Part one of the series can be found here. Part two of the series can be found here.
During the War on Terror, force drift was explained to me as the concept that increasing levels of force are seen to be reasonable, and there is an almost unstoppable trend toward the use of more and more force. Absent clear rules of engagement and without strong leadership, force drift is inevitable. Maybe these days we are living a force drift of greater dimensions.
It occurred to me that the Bush administration changed the rules of engagement after 9/11 by designating detainees, or those given to the US military, not as prisoners of war (POWs), but as unlawful enemy combatants. The Third Geneva Convention rules for POWs were replaced by the Fourth Geneva Convention rules for civilians. Rather than state clear rules of engagement, the Justice Department’s so-called “torture memos” blurred the definition of torture. The end result was that foreigners were detained, classified as unlawful enemy combatants on skimpy evidence, and — if they were not American citizens — kept in the war zone or rendered abroad, then tortured.
Under the Obama administration, the failure to prosecute high-level officials responsible for putting in place the new rules of engagement meant that departures from these already vague standards did not hold to account senior officials or military brass.
During Trump’s first term, relaxed standards of treatment of undocumented immigrants were applied outside of a war zone in the domestic immigration space. Despite being on American soil, undocumented immigrants were treated harshly as due process was often delayed or denied. The family separation on steroids policy comes to mind.
This practice continued during the Biden years in that the high-level civilians who put in place these policies during Trump’s first term — such as family separation — suffered no consequence for their actions. The Biden administration offered little more than ameliorative temporary statuses to some undocumented individuals and their families.
Now, under Trump’s second term, temporary statuses are being revoked, again turning people into undocumented individuals. We see further slippage in that the definition of undocumented immigrants and foreign nationals as “enemies” tied to foreign governments now encompasses “foreign gang” members on US soil. We have moved from the assertion of plenary powers in a state of armed conflict to the assertion of such powers in a lesser alleged state of emergency. Thus, undocumented individuals identified by the government with little to no evidence as “foreign gang” members are ascribed to a foreign state of their alleged nationality.
These same persons are then picked up by the US authorities, without due process, rendered to El Salvador, and disappeared into the foreign torture machine for an indefinite detention.
At the same time, immigrants and foreign nationals with legal status in the U.S. can now be questioned, held, and detained because of something they said.
It feels to me that the force drift wave against “foreigners” keeps moving to greater and greater groups of people, overseas and domestically, in more varied situations than armed conflict. Recently, as an example of this expansion, the targets of this effort against foreign nationals was based not on what the legal foreign national had done or said, but on what was said by their American citizen family member in a form of guilt by association.
Foreign nationals who arrived legally in the US are routinely refused entry if some indicia of dissent to the brutal US policy is found on their person. We see dissenting speech being reframed as “terrorist” speech (or “terrorist”-supporting speech) making the foreign national subject to deportation regardless of legal status. Efforts to ensure that foreign nationals have due process rights seem to be hanging on by a thread as the government moves them around.
This reframing of speech as “terrorism” also opens the way for harassment and prosecution of American citizens who speak in dissent along with foreign nationals. One wonders whether the other shoe will soon drop in detaining and prosecuting American citizens for their speech.
Infinitesimally short of a US citizen being disappeared or deported to some other country, we are now at a point of force drift where the government has disappeared an innocent foreign national, protected by US law, back to El Salvador from which he fled. While US government officials have publicly admitted their mistake, they evince complete indifference to the man’s plight and have no intention of bringing him back — assuming he is still alive. This is not normal.
The force drift has reached new hellish heights under the current Trump administration as the Department of Defense now seeks to make optional what was once mandatory training in the laws of war, such as rules of engagement, prohibited conduct during combat, and the proper handling of detainees. This change violates Article 144 of the Geneva Civilian Convention and Article 127 of the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention, both of which require military actors to “disseminate the text of the present Convention as widely as possible in their respective countries,” and be specially instructed about them. As this shift in policy takes hold, I fear the torture cycle will remain unbroken for both foreigners and citizens, here in the US and abroad.
Instead of strong leadership that could stem the tide of this force drift, we have leadership that wishes to coast along this force drift to maintain popularity and power. The legal guardrails are systematically relaxed or dismantled, making the kind of state violence described here almost certain to expand. Unless, that is, we fight back against this wave by relevant bodies like the courts and ordinary citizens rejecting this descent into the abyss.
